Macabre (1980) ★★★½
This review may contain spoilers.
If any director had big shoes to fill, it was Lamberto Bava, the son of Mario who is generally regarded as one of the greatest Italian horror directors and the ‘godfather’ of the Giallo film.
Approached to make a film with a script and a newspaper clipping guaranteeing the authenticity of the material, Lamberto Bava made Macabre as his debut feature to critical and commercial success. The third act reveal is oddly given away not only by the trailer but, more luridly, by most poster art and DVD covers all – I would have expected distributors to keep it a secret, just as the plot twists in Psycho were closely protected.
The clipping that Bava was handed was only a small report of a woman who kept her lover’s head in the freezer and that’s what happens in Macabre. Jane Baker (played by British actress Bernice Stegers) is busy having an affair with Fred Kellerman at the home of blind musical instrument repairman Robert Duval. One day when she tells her daughter, Lucy, that she has a meeting to go to, the curious and resourceful young girl goes through her mother's address book and calls Fred’s room where her mother answers. A little peeved, Lucy tries to think of something to do to get back at her mother and comes up with the obvious answer: fratricide! Luring her younger brother upstairs to play with his toy yacht in the bath, Lucy unemotionally drowns him and then lets her mother know that he’s dead. Desperate to get home, Jane gets Fred to drive her but they crash and Fred is beheaded, tipping Jane over the edge so she spends a year in a mental hospital.
Upon her release, Jane lodges in Fred’s apartment in Robert’s house where she has a shrine to her late lover and begins confusing her blind landlord when he hears orgiastic moaning from the room and Jane saying Fred’s name. Does she have another boyfriend called Fred or is she imagining things? The answer is worse than both of these and is in the freezer.
Macabre isn’t consistently horrific and I wanted Bava to do much more with Jane’s homicidal daughter, but he’s obviously a better filmmaker than I would ever be and knew what he was doing as everything is held back for the third act when all plot strands converge into a quite incredible ending.
Though I knew the major reveal the first time I saw Macabre because of the DVD cover, I really enjoyed this even when it neglected the tension and horror for a more darkly comic theme in the latter stages. The fact that they didn’t keep the ‘head in the freezer’ aspect a secret is puzzling as the film would have been so much more effective if that had come as a surprise but there is a decent twist in the tail that gets you just before the final credits. Lamberto Bava isn’t a director of his father’s calibre but this is a pretty good film with creditable performances throughout. It's a film I've seen several times and enjoyed every time.
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